French investigators
are scrambling to establish why a 31-year-old French-Tunisian with no
obvious links to terror groups or radicals rented a 19-tonne truck
and killed at least 84 people, including 10 children, on the seafront
in Nice, in France’s third massacre of civilians in 18 months.

Mohamed
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a chauffeur and a petty criminal who lived in the
Riviera city, accelerated the heavy goods vehicle through thick
crowds for more than a mile along a beachfront esplanade on Thursday
night, turning a Bastille Day festival of fireworks and families into
carnage before police shot him dead.

In all, 202 people
were injured, 80 of them critically, and the death toll is expected
to rise. About 50 children were injured, many of them young, many of
them seriously. No European attack in recent years has taken such a
heavy toll on preteens. France will start three days of mourning on
Saturday.

The French
president, François Hollande, extended for another three months the
state of emergency imposed after last November’s Paris attacks, and
flew to the scene of Thursday’s massacre.

“We are facing a
long battle because we have an enemy who will continue to hate all
the people who enjoy liberty,” said Hollande, who is coming under
increasing pressure to take more decisive action to defend France
from its gravest security crisis since 1945. “The whole of France
is facing the threat of Islamist terrorism,” he added.

But according to
François Molins, the Paris prosecutor leading the investigation, the
perpetrator, pinpointed by identity documents found in the truck, had
no obvious links to radical Islam. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was “totally
unknown to intelligence services … and was never flagged for signs
of radicalisation”, Molins said.

Molins said the
perpetrator was known to police for a series of minor fracas over the
past six years, including one violent altercation with another
motorist earlier this year for which he received a suspended
sentence.

The prosecutor said
that although no group had claimed the attack, “this sort of thing
fits in perfectly with calls for murder from such terrorist
organisations”. He noted there were two Kalashnikov rifles, bullets
and a grenade in the cab of truck, where the driver was shot dead by
police.

Locals from the area
of Nice where Lahouaiej-Bouhlel lived said he did not seem religious
and did not go to the mosque.

The attack began
shortly before 11pm on Thursday when the truck somehow gained access
to the Promenade des Anglais and began mowing into bystanders and
revellers, who had gathered to watch Bastille Day fireworks.
Officials said the driver weaved along the road, knocking people down
“like skittles”, for at least 2km (1.2 miles).

Witnesses said
people pushed each other out of the way, jumped down to the beach and
even ran into the sea to avoid the vehicle. Others described victims
being hurled around like mannequins, bodies littering the esplanade
in the wake of the zigzagging truck.

A local official
said the vehicle was only brought to a stop by the heroics of a
person who tried to jump on to its front. The driver then opened fire
before police killed him with a volley of shots through the
windscreen.

Most of the dead
were French, but there were also at least three Germans, two
Americans and one Russian national, as well as Tunisians and
Algerians. A number of Britons were also caught up in the attack.

As investigators
continued to comb the vehicle, questions were being asked as to how
the truck managed to get down to the waterfront. The city centre has
restrictions on heavy goods vehicles, and there were additional
security restrictions for the festival including metal barriers.

Hollande is under
intense pressure to do more to shore up security nationwide. Marine
Le Pen, the Front National leader and a rival for next year’s
presidential election, called for a “war on Islamic
fundamentalism”, saying that all that had happened so far was a
“war on words”.

She told Le Figaro:
“Nothing that we have proposed has been put in place. Considering
the new nature of terrorism which is now a terrorism of opportunity,
that’s to say without hierarchical structure, the urgency is to
attack the ideology on which this terrorism is based.”

Alain Juppé, a
centre-right presidential hopeful, said: “We know there are faults
and shortcomings – the parliamentary inquiry after the November
attacks showed us that. We must absolutely lead this struggle against
radicalisation and better coordinate our intelligence services.”

World leaders were
more sympathetic in their responses. Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and
the new British prime minister, Theresa May, all spoke with Hollande
to convey condolences. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, sent a
message to Hollande, saying: “We have sympathy for and solidarity
with the French people”.

Religious and
political leaders across the Muslim and Arab world condemned the
attacker. He committed an act of “extreme cowardice”, the
Tunisian government said in a statement.

Solidarity rallies
were announced in at least a dozen French towns and cities for the
weekend, and a mass for the victims was held in Nice Cathedral on
Friday evening. The mood in the city was one of anger rather than
despair.

Nice’s waterfront
was all but deserted on Friday, beaches empty, cafes abandoned, the
esplanade cordoned off and the white truck used in the attack visible
from a distance, its windscreen pockmarked with bullet holes and its
front buckled.

On the street, Piero
Bianculli, 37, an Italian musician who grew up in Nice, said he had
been at his stepfather’s apartment on the beachfront watching the
fireworks display from the balcony when the truck hit.

“We had been
invited over to watch the fireworks because he had such a beautiful
view of the sea,” he said. “Suddenly we saw people in the street
running and screaming. We thought it was a false alarm or some sort
of joke, but when I looked to the right I saw bodies flying in the
air, and people thrown to the ground who didn’t get up.

“I took my
binoculars and looked all the way up the promenade, and saw dead
bodies lying scattered where they had fallen, bleeding. There was
blood streaming across the street.”

A man in a white
blanket, haggard and dazed, limped down the street as neighbours
tried to hold him up.

“He’s lost his
whole family,” said a woman, crying behind her sunglasses.